Women, Guns and Suicide

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Women who live in households where a handgun is present are “significantly” at risk of using the gun to take their own lives, according to a California study.

The authors of the 12-year study, published in the JAMA Psychiatry journal, said it was the largest effort to explore the risk of having a gun at home.

The lead author, Dr. Matthew Miller, a professor of epidemiology at Northeastern University, compared it to analyzing second-hand risks associated with smoking.

“The question we tried to address is what happens to a woman’s suicide risk when someone she lives with her brings a handgun into their gun-free home for the first time,” he said in a statement accompanying the findings.

“The answer: her chance of dying by suicide increases by more than 40 percent.”

The researchers began their study with a database examining suicides among 9.5 million California women. Linking voter registration files and gun purchases recorded by dealers, between 2004 and 2016, they identified about 331,000 women who began living  with someone who legally purchased  a handgun during that period.

337 Suicides By Gun

They found that women living in households where guns were present had “substantially higher” suicide rates that those in non-gun households. Specifically, about 337 women, or 15 percent of the suicides in that cohort, used a firearm.

The researchers said their findings supported earlier studies showing having guns at home increased the risk of accidental or intentional death.

“Despite widespread perceptions that a gun in the home makes its inhabitants safer, rigorous studies have been nearly unanimous in finding that people who live in homes with guns are at higher risk of dying violent deaths, whether by homicide, suicide, or in accidents,” said co-author David Studdert, a professor of health policy in the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Health Policy and a professor of law at Stanford Law.

“But homes don’t own guns; people do. And sorting out exactly who in these homes faces elevated risks and estimating the size of those risks is vitally important.”

The study concluded that women living in households with gun owners “had substantially higher suicide rates.”

“For every 100 000 women who did not own guns in our study who had a handgun enter their previously handgun-free home, we estimate that an extra 21 firearm suicides occurred over the ensuing 10 years compared with the number expected to have occurred had their cohabitants not acquired firearms,” the study said.

The study found that women exposed to guns in the household in their sample were more likely to be white and to live in a rural area.  But the study provided no information about whether the firearms in the households studied were stored safely or locked away—a factor that has been shown by research to be crucial in preventing both accidental and intentional firearm deaths.

The study focused only on handguns, and did not adjust for mental illness, a major risk factor for suicide.

It did not cover households where guns possessed illegally were present.

Impact of COVID

The researchers said the fact that “millions of people in the U.S. have become new gun owners since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic,” should make their findings especially concerning.

“Prior work suggests a greater than three-fold increase in the risk of dying by suicide for adults who become new gun owners,” the study said.

“A less obvious outcome of the spike in firearm sales that began in March of 2020 is that millions of non–gun owners have also become exposed to household firearms for the first time, most of whom are women and children.”

The authors said they “ conservatively estimate” that women in the newly exposed households were about 1.5 times as likely to die by suicide now compared with the pre-pandemic era.

Other authors of the study were: Yifan Zhang, PhD.,  Erin E. Holsinger, MD; Lea Prince, PhD; Sonja Swanson, ScD; and Garen J. Wintemute, MD.

The study was funded by the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research and the Joyce Foundation. Stanford Law School, and the Stanford University School of Medicine supported assembly of the cohort used in the study.

The full article is available for purchase here.